Archive | May 2017

Georgian Food and the Turkish Sparkers

May31

Last weekend I was in Chicago because I was giving a talk at the Chicago Linguistic Society’s conference (I had an awfully good time the last time I went to CLS two years ago). Shortly before I left, my advisor sent me a magazine article about a Georgian restaurant (the only Georgian restaurant?) in Chicago. The conference ended on Saturday, but I didn’t fly out until the following evening, so on Sunday I decided to seek out this restaurant.

Chicago Diplomat Café is a deep, high-ceilinged restaurant with leather-backed armchairs and black tablecloths and an aquarium with goldfish. When I arrived shortly before noon, there was only one other party, a couple, dining. I was seated at a little table not far from them. I can’t remember if I’ve ever eaten alone in a sit-down restaurant before, but it wasn’t too awkward. With my suitcase in tow, I fancied I looked like a worldly traveler.

The magazine article had mentioned all sorts of scrumptious dishes, and my one regret in coming alone was that I doubted I’d be able to try more than one dish (no supra for me). There were three kinds of khachapuri, but if I ordered one I didn’t think I’d be able to eat anything else. I decided I wanted the khinkali, Georgian soup dumplings. But when I asked the waiter if I could have them, he said no. I was a bit flummoxed and said something about them not having khinkali today. The waiter didn’t exactly confirm this, but I switched my order to the mtsvadi. I also ordered a Georgian lemonade, pear flavor (the other option was tarragon). If the waiter approved of my Georgian pronunciation, he gave no sign of it.

Georgian lemonade

The Georgian lemonade turned out to be a bottled soda that didn’t taste at all like lemonade. It was a little too sweet for my taste; it gave me the impression of carbonated apple juice (the kind of apple juice preschoolers drink). The mtsvadi was tasty, though it wasn’t quite what I’d expected from the menu. The seasoned chunks of chicken had been cooked on a skewer, and the Georgian fried potatoes were…basically French fries (though quite good ones). The red sauce on the side was sour (in a good way). The menu had called mtsvadi the dish of kings. According to the magazine article, the chicken was marinated in pomegranate juice, and the sauce was tkemali, a sour plum sauce.

Mtsvadi

While I was eating, a larger party with a reservation came in. One young woman was explaining the dishes to her friends, and I later heard her tell the waiter she’d been a Peace Corps volunteer in Georgia. She and the waiter discussed the fact that Georgian lemonade is in fact flavored soda, not lemonade (wish I’d heard that sooner). The group discussed ordering khinkali, and I thought to myself that they would be disappointed as I’d been. But then when the Peace Corps volunteer asked for two orders of the dumplings, the waiter accepted the order! There was some brief exchange I didn’t catch (perhaps khinkali take a while to prepare?), but the Peace Corps volunteer said one of her friends had his heart set on khinkali, and it seemed clear they were being allowed to order them. I was miffed. Someday I will eat khinkali!

In other news from roughly the same part of the world…the Turkish edition of Sparkers appears to be coming out tomorrow, June 1st! The Turkish title is Kıvılcımlar, which Google Translate tells me means “sparks,” and it was translated by Canan Vaner. The publisher is Kırmızı Kedi (Red Cat!), and their page for the book is here (it seems to be on lots of Turkish bookselling sites, but I can’t really read any of them, so I’ll just link to the publisher). If you or anyone you know reads Turkish, consider buying the first foreign edition of Sparkers!

Yumi Sakugawa, Krista Suh, and MILCK

May11

On Monday night Isabelle sent me a link to an Instagram post by Yumi Sakugawa announcing that she would be participating in a panel at UCLA the following evening with MILCK and Krista Suh. Yumi Sakugawa is a comic book artist and the author of, among other books, I Think I Am in Friend-Love With You. MILCK (a.k.a. Connie Lim) wrote the song “Quiet” and sang it at the January Women’s March in Washington, D.C. in a performance that immediately went viral. And Krista Suh is a screenwriter and co-creator of the Pussy Hat Project, also of Women’s March fame. (It wasn’t until days after the Women’s March that I learned that Asian American women were behind both the pussy hats and the song that was being called the anthem of the march.)

The panel was variously advertised as being about women of color, intersectional feminism, Asian American women, creativity, and mental health. I was sold. And Isabelle is a big fan of Yumi Sakugawa and MILCK. So the decision to go was easy. Plus it was on campus.

The panel was hosted by LCC Theatre Co., an Asian American theater company at UCLA that Sakugawa was involved in as a student here. The evening started off with the trailer for Krista Suh’s documentary “I AM ENOUGH/Tea with Demons,” featuring Suh, Sakugawa, and MILCK and exploring the Asian American artist experience. It looks gorgeous and kind of just made me want to run away with my friends to write and make art and music in the desert.

Then the panel got underway, moderated by an LCC member. And here’s the thing: what MILCK, Sakugawa, and Suh talked about on Tuesday evening was almost eerily relevant to my life right now. As soon as I’d heard about the panel, I’d known I didn’t want to miss it for anything, but I didn’t realize how à propos it would be. For much of the panel, I felt like the three artists were speaking directly to me.

They talked about figuring out what they wanted to do (sing, write and draw, write) and in some cases having to break it to their parents that they didn’t actually want to be pre-med/pre-law/whatever. They talked about how long it took them to accept that they knew what they really wanted to do and what obstacles (often internal) they’d had to overcome to start pursuing what they wanted. They talked about friendship, about finding your people and both supporting and seeking support from your friends when they or you are going through a hard time. As an audience member later pointed out, it was wonderful to see their friendship shining through as they interacted on the panel.

Quite early on, Suh asked how many of us knew we wanted to do something creative (she knew her audience well). Most people’s hands went up, including mine. Then she asked how many of us were afraid or ashamed of that wanting. I didn’t raise my hand that time because I remember thinking very clearly that I wasn’t ashamed of wanting to write, but later I wondered, Am I still afraid? Even though I’m already an author? Maybe.

MILCK said something later that also resonated with me. She said to ask yourself what kind of suffering you were willing to endure. What are you willing to suffer for? What is worth the suffering for you? (And the unspoken converse, at least to my ears: What isn’t worth the suffering for you?)

Before the audience Q & A, they played us MILCK’s music video for “Quiet,” which I had seen before but was perfectly happy to watch again. And after the Q & A, Isabelle and I and a bunch of other people flocked to the front of the room where the panelists were to talk to them. Sakugawa had a few books and zines and prints on hand. We talked to MILCK first; Isabelle was delighted to hear there’d be more songs from her soon. Then we talked to Sakugawa, who said she remembered Isabelle from the Little Tokyo Book Festival. Isabelle introduced me as the writer friend she’d gotten Sakugawa to sign Friend-Love for. We all talked a little more (we told MILCK and Sakugawa that we were grad students in linguistics), and then Isabelle and I headed out. Night had fallen and the full moon slid in and out of the black clouds and walking past the botanical garden the air was heavy with the scent of honeysuckle.

YALLWEST 2017

May3

This past Saturday was YALLWEST, a massive YA book festival held at Santa Monica High School. I went last year and had a great time seeing tons of authors I admire on panels. This year, Isabelle and I went together. I had two authors I wanted to get books signed by and a whole itinerary of panels planned out.

The first thing I did upon arriving at the festival was to buy Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner. I had already read (and loved) both books, and both authors have more recent books, but those were the ones I wanted signed. From the Mysterious Galaxy bookselling tent, we went straight to the signing line for Benjamin Alire Sáenz. And after I got my book signed, we started the panel marathon.

Kingdoms & Quests: Epic Fantasy Roadtrips

S. Jae-Jones (moderator) [I’ve read her posts and podcast notes on PubCrawl–I think she’s into baby seals too!], Roshani Chokshi, Jessica Cluess, Heidi Heilig [a hapa author whom I saw at AWP and whose The Girl from Everywhere I’ve read], Linda Sue Park, and Erin Summerill

  • Jessica Cluess introduced herself as a Gryffindor while acknowledging that “it’s more posh to be Slytherin these days” (judging by the audience’s relative enthusiasm for the four houses, we Ravenclaws were the most numerous).
  • Erin Summerill said that after she creates a map of her world, she chooses the bleakest place on the map for the story’s setting.
  • It sounds like Linda Sue Park has a new book in the works about a hapa dragon (my term)!
  • Jessica Cluess told an anecdote that left me quite dismayed: Her fantasy novels have a Victorian setting, and so she once wrote in a manuscript that the characters danced a mazurka. She said her editor, who normally asks questions in the margins or makes gentle suggestions, simply crossed out “mazurka.” Later in a phone call, Jessica Cluess asked her editor offhand why she’d done that, and her editor said, “No one cares about the mazurka!” My jaw may have dropped, and Isabelle patted me consolingly on the shoulder. See, I learned the mazurka at bals folks in Grenoble and am rather fond of the dance. Plus the characters in my current project actually do dance the mazurka (under a different name). Now it’s my mission to make sure the mazurka makes it to the final draft!

Yallcraft: So You’re Thinking of Writing a Series?

Traci Chee (moderator) [I read her novel The Reader, which is also on the hapa book list!], Kasie West, Evelyn Skye, and Lindsay Cummings

  • I didn’t take a lot of notes at this one, but I remember the authors discussing whether they knew in advance which characters would die in the series or whether they impulsively decided to kill characters along the way.

Writ Large: Myths, Folk Tales, and Modern Retellings

Zoraida Cordova (moderator), Megan Whalen Turner, Wendy Spinale, Cecil Castelluci, Natalie C. Parker, Tracey Baptiste, and F.C. Yee

  • I may have been following Megan Whalen Turner throughout YALLFEST… This panel and the previous one were both in Santa Monica High School’s Gallery, and behind the panelists’ chairs were these two big boards covered with fan art for various books. Isabelle and I had already taken a look during the break between panels. One of the pieces was a portrait of the Queen of Eddis from Megan Whalen Turner’s books. As the authors began to arrive, I thought I recognized MWT, but I knew for sure when she went to examine the fan art and exclaimed, “This is from my book!”
  • Megan Whalen Turner talked about how wonderful it is that we still read about friendships in stories written hundreds and even thousands of years ago. She mentioned the Epic of Gilgamesh, and at the time I thought she said “romance” (and I wondered what romance she was referring to), but Isabelle later told me she’d said “bromance.” Anyway, the enduring power of literary friendships is beautiful.

After this panel, it was Megan Whalen Turner’s hour in the signing area, so Isabelle and I went to get in line. The woman behind us engaged us in conversation for a bit; she was an MWT fan on another level. She seemed to know that there would be a sixth book in the series, another one after Thick As Thieves, which hasn’t quite come out yet! When it was my turn to have my book signed, I managed to tell Megan Whalen Turner how I’d come to read her books and that The Queen of Attolia had blown me away.

Writing the Resistance: World Building IRL

Daniel José Older (moderator) [I seem to go to a lot of his panels–witness AWP!] , Marie Marquardt, Victoria Aveyard, Angie Thomas [she burst onto the scene with The Hate U Give, which I hope to read very soon], Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and Sona Charaipotra

  • Daniel José Older had apparently managed to get through his morning keynote with Cassandra Clare without swearing once, so he opened this panel with, “If you don’t like swearing, just leave now.”
  • A lot of this panel was what you’d expect from the title. A lot of it was also Benjamin Alire Sáenz being jaw-droppingly eloquent about his ideals and what it is we do when we write. Also, when an audience member asked the panelists if they’d ever been criticized by their own communities for the way they’d written about them, he said, after acknowledging that he had received such criticism, “I’m not afraid to be criticized. I’m not afraid of anything.”
  • The guy sitting next to me asked the panelists if they’d ever considered writing utopian fiction, as opposed to dystopian fiction, and their general reaction was: What would be the point? Where’s the conflict? But I kept thinking of Neal Shusterman’s Scythe (which, for the record, I have not read). Perhaps that’s an example of a utopia that has its dark side (after all, doesn’t The Giver start out utopian?). I also wondered about something else, though. Isn’t one of the great things about speculative fiction supposed to be that it can show us possible futures that are better than our present? There’s still conflict, of course, but set against an optimistic backdrop.

Fantasyish: The Role of Fantasy in the New Surreality of 2017

Alex London (moderator), Cassandra Clare, Danielle Paige, Daniel José Older, Megan Whalen Turner, and Zoraida Cordova

  • By now you may be able to tell which authors I was stalking.
  • Alex London opened the panel with a longish quote from Ursula K. LeGuin and then said, “Now be smarter than Ursula LeGuin.” Megan Whalen Turner joked that they could be done now.
  • MWT remarked that “we don’t often talk about the roots of conflict [i.e. war] in our fantasy for children.” And she also said that none of the people in her world are happy to take on responsibilities, but, for instance, Sophos, in A Conspiracy of Kings, reaches a point where he realizes he can’t make the decision he wants to, and he steps up. I pondered this because I’ve been interested in writing characters who choose duty over other things. Such as love.
  • Daniel José Older wondered aloud how fantasy writers can tell the truth while still giving people a happy place to go to.
  • MWT talked about reading the Chronicles of Narnia when she was six and never having grown out of the desire to check the back of the wardrobe (I like to think I haven’t either).

Ask Me Anything: The LGBTQIA+ Edition

Sam Maggs (moderator), Jeramey Kraatz, John Corey Whaley [I loved his Where Things Come Back–I think I said so last year too], Adam Silvera [I read his More Happy Than Not, and during this panel I think I learned that we’re the same age], Natalie C. Parker, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and CB Lee

  • I’ll just sum this one up in one quote. Sam Maggs: “I’m from Canada, where everyone is 30% gay.” To which someone responded, “That’s why they’re so nice.”

After the last panel, Isabelle and I decided to visit Small World Books in Venice because in addition to being YALLWEST Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day. We walked along the beach to get there, skirting sand castles and watching adorable sandpipers chase the retreating waves. We even stumbled upon a bizarre, pulsing, pink, translucent creature that was sort of shaped like a shell but decidedly gelatinous. Later research suggested it might have been a burrowing sea cucumber. At Small World Books, the bookseller behind the counter indulged us by showing us the timid new bookstore cat. The shop is really lovely and has a nice selection; there was a display of Hugo and Nebula nominees, and I picked up Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit. We lingered until closing.